Lower Sixth History Reading Group

The book
to be considered in the first half of the 2018 Autumn term is John
Cooper's fascinating account of the life and career of Francis Walsingham,
Elizabeth I's spymaster.

The Daily
Telegraph review of October 2011 read as follows:

The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I by
John Cooper

A Tudor tale of cloak-and-dagger intrigue

By Ian Thomson

Sir Francis Walsingham, the spymaster
extraordinaire and priest-hunter at the court of Elizabeth I, was devoted to
the defence of the Tudor realm and its anti-Catholic cause. With Machiavellian
adroitness, he infiltrated Papist cells in England and abroad, and subjected
“Romish” suspects to a brutal and insistent Protestant dogma. Hundreds were
hanged or burned alive in post-Reformation England; perceived Spanish attempts
to dethrone Elizabeth redoubled the persecutions.

The Queen’s Agent, a superb new
account of Walsingham and the Tudor age, paints a John le Carré-like world of
double-dealing and intrigue, where moles were planted in Catholic seminaries
and loyalties were seen to shift opportunely. In the looking-glass war of
Elizabethan diplomacy, traitors were never far away. Walsingham was so subtle
an operative, according to John Cooper, that he was able to turn priest against
priest and extract confessions with ease.

Central to Cooper’s book is the
question of whether English Catholics really conspired to undermine the
Elizabethan regime. Through circles of informants and spies, Walsingham was
able to disrupt a number of plots against his patron-monarch. But how serious
were they? Post-Reformation England was jittery with fears of recusant
Catholicism; in the eyes of Walsingham and his enforcers, Jesuits especially
were seen as sinister types bent on popish intrigue.

With a fanatic’s heart, Walsingham
spread fear (the most important weapon in his armoury) among Jesuits and their
followers. In this paranoid climate, almost anyone could be smoked out of
hiding and sent to the gallows. Walsingham had been in Paris in 1572 during the
St Bartholomew’s massacre of Protestants, and was left with a lifelong loathing
of Catholicism.

His finest hour was the discovery of
a plot to put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne and depose her cousin
Elizabeth. Having established Mary’s involvement in the Catholic plot,
Walsingham authorised her beheading without Elizabeth’s knowledge. Outwardly,
at least, Elizabeth was devastated.

Some historians have viewed her as
crypto-Catholic and she was certainly known to keep a crucifix and candles in
her bedside cabinet. Unlike Walsingham, Elizabeth saw no contradiction between
tradition and reform, but that did not make her Catholic.

In pages of crisp prose and with
punctilious scholarship and vivid storytelling, The Queen’s Agent
brilliantly recreates Elizabethan England in all its cloak-and-dagger intrigue
and glory. George Smiley would have liked it.